1. Field
The embodiments disclosed herein are directed to an apparatus and a method for reducing power consumption in facilities such as a data center and a server room which can house a plurality of electronic devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, huge and highly complicated data centers, and IT (Information Technology) devices with increased performance and increased density have caused a more serious problem of power consumption in the data centers. Generally, in a rough breakdown of the power consumption (for input power) in the data center, an air conditioner occupies 45%, the IT devices occupy 30%, and a power supply and the like occupy 25%.
Therefore, a key point for reducing the power consumption in the data center is how much power consumption for the air conditioner is reduced. Accordingly, conventionally, in order to improve a cooling efficiency, an air conditioning design based on the assumption of how heated air (hot air) exhausted from servers flows within a room has been performed.
Conventional techniques are not based on the assumption of a facility such as the data center, and in which, in a computer system having a plurality of processors, the processors having a large heat generation amount are powered down and a degraded operation is performed when a capability of the air conditioner is reduced, when a voltage of an input power source is reduced, or the like.
However, the hot air flowing within the data center dynamically varies depending on a load on the servers. Therefore, it is unknown how much air volume can be secured in individual racks, until operations are actually performed. As a result thereof, a hot spot may occur at an unpredictable place, and an air conditioning effect may not be able to be obtained as expected. In such a case, there is a problem in that a load is imposed on the air conditioner, which causes increase in the power consumption.